Mr. Speaker, if only there was a way I could tell the parliamentary secretary, in one minute, of the 40 years of work I have put into environmental assessment; how casually it was trashed when Stephen Harper came in; how clearly the mandate letter to former environment minister Catherine McKenna said, “Fix this”; how she did not fix it but instead kept the Harper model; and how, because of that, the court found it unconstitutional.
We had a system that worked. The expert panel on environmental assessment gave the government clear information on what to do. It chose not to do it. What that means is that right now a project clearly in federal jurisdiction could wipe out an endangered species. It would never hit a red flag. It would never hit a trigger. It would never get assessed, because we have abandoned the core principles we had for EA since 1993.